Here are the first few paragraphs from a great piece done by Robert Hurwitt in the SF Chronicle and The Gate, looking ahead to the opening of PianoFight in San Francisco where I will be performing in the remarkable space in the holiday “classic” A Merry Forking! Christmas. The show opens December 19. Please click on the link and read the whole thing. And, of course, I hope you can make one of the performances. Tickets should be part of your holiday gift-giving, don’t you think? My dad would like a plane ticket to San Francisco, Santa. (I know you read this. You know when I’ve been sleeping, for goodness sake.)

(By Robert Hurwitt, TheGate.com) Three guys walk into a theater to put on a play and, before they can start rehearsal, they’re handed the keys to the three-theater complex. A few years later and several blocks away, they’ve renovated a burned-out former Tenderloin landmark restaurant — the old Original Joe’s — and turned it into their own two-theater complex, with a full bar and restaurant, a cabaret stage, dressing rooms, green rooms, rehearsal spaces and even a small film production unit.

It didn’t happen quite that fast. For the PianoFight founding trio — Rob Ready, Dan Williams and Kevin Fink — it’s been close to a third of a lifetime since that first play in 2007.

They’ve produced, performed in and fostered quite a few productions since then, some ingeniously interactive, from their first real success with audience-judged new-plays contests (“ShortLived”) and Daniel Heath’s “Forking” plays (in which the audience keeps choosing which path the plot takes) to its “Throw Rotten Veggies at the Actors” nights, and pop-up events in Bolinas and beyond.

“We’re all 30 years old,” Ready says. “We started when we were 23.” (continued: click the photo below to read the rest of the article)

Playing through September 1, 2013 at Theatre Three in Dallas, So Help Me God is a treasure. What an opportunity to work with some of the region’s top actors on a rarely produced but simply authentic look at backstage drama in the world of theatre back in the 1920s. Hope you can see the performance at Theatre Three if you are in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Doug Jackson is resigned to being a funny guy — most of the time. For more than 30 years, the Dallas actor has been busy on many local stages as well as in movies and TV ads. At Theatre Three alone, where Jackson begins

performances as Ken Lay in Enron this week, he has helped set many records.

For example, he played the lead, Seymour, when Theatre Three’s 1986 Little Shop of Horrors compiled the longest run of any Dallas theatrical production. He also performed for years in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which broke that earlier record by a mile. He has starred in everything from Neil Simon to Stephen Sondheim, and he has played Harpo Marx onstage four different times. He was even one of the few area actors who worked regularly at the Dallas Theater Center during the Richard Hamburger regime.

“Doug is right up there at the top of the people who are still around,” Theatre Three executive producer-director Jac Alder says. “There are not many people who can do as many roles. He’s a song-and-dance man, and he’s funny — which means he can do anything. You can’t trust an actor who can’t make people laugh.”

From the beginning of his long career, Jackson has known he’s not the leading-man type. “I’m 5-foot-8 and don’t have a jaw line,” he says. “In The Music Man, I’d love to play Harold Hill. But I’m not Harold Hill, I’m the anvil salesman.”

Still, there’s one type of role Jackson thinks he should land, but fate always seems to get in the way. That’s “the guy who plays the lead who is really supposed to be a character man.” He gets upset when parts such as Cyrano de Bergerac or Fagin in Oliver! go to a conventional leading man.

“If you put a big nose on a pretty face, you are not serving the script,” Jackson laments.

Jackson went out on a national tour after finishing the Theater Center’s graduate acting program alongside other prominent local actors such as John S. Davies and the late Lynn Mathis. On that tour, he met his wife and frequent co-star, Amy Mills, currently starring in Pfamily Arts’ A Little Night Music. Both their daughters have embarked on acting careers, as well. When he’s not onstage or filming movies, such as The Last Stand with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackson is doing computer-aided design to pay for additions to his Oak Cliff house or his daughters’ educations.

Jackson credits a guest director of a Feydeau farce during his Theater Center training for one of his biggest secrets about being funny onstage: “To play comedy, you have to learn to stand still.”

Former Theatre Three actor-director Laurence O’Dwyer told him another: “The number one thing is to make sure the audience understands every last word. You have to get out of comedy’s way.”

Even in serious dramas such as Enron, Lucy Prebble’s study of the business shenanigans that brought down the Houston energy giant, such lessons can come in handy.

“I got excited when I saw Doug’s name on the audition list,” Enron director Jeffrey Schmidt says. “This character can’t be purely evil. He needs to have redeeming qualities. Everyone had a part in this collapse.”

Plan your life

Enron is April 25 through May 25 at Theatre Three at the Quadrangle, 2800 Routh St., Dallas. $10 to $50. 214-871-3300. theatre3dallas.com.